Will We Really?

[yandros]

For background, lemurtanis put on the first season of Babylon 5 tonight. While wondering just how much of the intro speech would come back to me, I tripped across the line ``the year is 2258, the name of the place...'' and found myself thinking ``In exactly 250 years, we'll have returned to space, found ourselves an uplift partner and a set of jumpgates,

Comments

[dcltdw]

Well, I dunno. 1758? We didn't have steam power back then, did we?

I feel like we're at a bootstrapping problem right now: it's just a liiiittle too far out of reach to get back into space easily. You don't have just any ol' family going out West into space.

But well, SpaceShip One, so maybe soon.

[thatwesguy]

Okay, a few things:

1) BABYLON 5!!! I just acquired it myself, and have been watching through it on my iPhone. I'm nearly through Season One. Love love love.

2) "Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade." This rings true for me, even when I try to adjust my estimates based on that statement. Even when I try to do so recursively, in fact.

So my feeling is that there's every reason to believe that we can't possibly know what'll happen in a century, let alone 2.5 of them. For example, a century ago Vinge and Kurzweil's "Singularity" wasn't really even conceivable. Now it seems that it's only a question of when, not whether, computer advances will render all previous trendlines so much less useful that we will be in a world that we can't really predict from our perspective now

[rshah21]

I don't remember the exact history, but I believe B5 was somewhat predicated on the "make contact with other alien species, and beg, borrow and steal their technology" path.

Also, as Dave and Wes point out, technological leaps can occur quickly. Kennedy's proposal to put a man on the moon in under a decade was completed in under that time. Yes, it requires immense dedication and investment (hey Obama - here's another way to spend the $850bn - mars mission. As a matter of fact, the washingtonpost's front page this morning compares the $850bn to major investments over the past century.)

Optimism and Futurism

[yandros]

Interestingly (for myself), I intellectually buy the arguments for the living-in-space case, but it's not intuitively clear the way it once was.

Put another way, it's not that I disagree with the arguments, or that I didn't know them -- it's that although I did know, understand, and agree with the arguments, my gut reaction has changed from `of course' to `no way', and I'm not sure how/when/why.